Music players come and go. Yesterday, a particular player might’ve been the #1 music library manager. Tomorrow, a new music player could come out and decimate the current competition. The cycle has always been true and will always stay true. Does AIMP3 offer enough to be that music player?

Let’s rewind a bit. For the longest time, I’ve been a loyal Foobar2000Play Music Like An Audiophile With Foobar2000 [Windows]Play Music Like An Audiophile With Foobar2000 [Windows]Foobar2000 is the desktop music player of choice for audiophiles, tinkerers and anyone looking for a lightweight, efficient program. We have it listed on our page of the best Windows software for a reason, although...Read More user. Yes, I’ve used it since its debut all the way back in 2002 and I’ve never used anything else (other than a short stint with Songbird when that first came out). I love it because it’s clean, fast, and minimalistic. Before Foobar2000, Winamp was the gold standard–even with its then-bloated package.

And though I still enjoy Foobar2000 as much as I did when I first found it, I’m the kind of guy that likes change every once in a while. What other lightweight and fast music players are available? Upon hearing about AIMP3, I knew I had to give it a shot. I was not disappointed.

When user interfaces are involved, music players tend to fall into 3 distinct categories: the single window with multiple panes (e.g., iTunes); the resizable single window playlist (e.g., Foobar2000); and the multiple window layout (e.g., Winamp). AIMP3 falls into that last category.

Upon first glance, I thought that the AIMP3 interface looked remarkably similar to Winamp’s own. That might just be a sign that I haven’t seen many other players using the same layout, but I’d say it’s a fair observation. And frankly, I like it. It’s simple, efficient, and clean–everything that I prefer in terms of aesthetics.

For those of you that like full-window, everything-encapsulated-as-one-unit type of layouts, I don’t know what to say. As far as I know, there’s no way to lay the AIMP3 interface in any other way. If this is a dealbreaker for you, I suppose there’s no reason for you to keep reading.

In AIMP3, you can open up a separate window–isolated from the main player and playlist–to manage all of the music files on your computer. This is aptly named the Audio Library. As it turns out, the Audio Library has proved useful to me.

With the Audio Library, you can build and manage your music collection with ease. AIMP3 has a built-in feature that lets you scan your entire computer for audio files. Once it finds all the relevant folders, you can select which ones you want to include. In a few minutes, BAM! Library built.

Now that you have a working Audio Library, you can use it to drag-and-drop songs and files into various AIMP3 playlists. Or you can just use the Audio Library as its own music player since it comes equipped with its own Now Playing section.

The Audio Library will even track data like how many times a song has been played, which albums you most listen to, how many songs/albums/genres/etc. you have, and more. AIMP3 can generate a simple HTML report that shows you all of this data, too.

If you are a neat freak (read: borderline OCD), then you will love AIMP3’s Advanced Tag Editor. With it, you can clean up your music file tags in a matter of minutes–depending on how many songs you need to clean up, of course.

For me, this feature is invaluable. I’m unusually obsessive about the tags in my music files, and I cringe when something doesn’t fit the templates I’ve created. If you don’t care about things like that, then you likely won’t need to use this amazing tool.

You’re presented with two options: IceCast stations or custom stations. With the IceCast window, you can search through a list of Internet radio stations using the IceCast protocol. Filter, search, and sort by name, song, and format. If you know a few stations that you want to listen to, use the Custom window. Insert the new station (by right-clicking or hitting the Insert key) and you’ll be good to go.

As expected from most music players these days, AIMP3 offers a broad range of customization options. Some are back-end operational tweaks, such as the timeout required for a stop when listening to Internet radio. Others are front-end user tweaks, like which columns to show in a playlist and how the visualization ought to look.

Personally, I don’t fiddle around with music player options very much. The only one I tend to care about are the hotkeys–AIMP3 delivers on this front. You can set individual hotkeys for when you have AIMP3 as your focus window, and then you can also set an alternate set of hotkeys for when AIMP3 isn’t focused. In other words, local vs. global hotkeys.

If you like heavy customization, I think AIMP3 will be enough. At least you can create and download different skins to change the look of the player itself.

Speaking of customization, AIMP3 also allows users to develop and install different plugins. These plugins are categorized into different sections: Addons, Input Plugins, Visual Plugins, Winamp General, Winamp DSP, and Components. I’m not exactly sure what these mean, but I’m grateful that a plugin system exists.

AIMP3 comes equipped with a number of plugins right out of the box. There’s one that automatically updates your Last.fm account with Now Playing information. A few plugins allow you to listen to music encoded with a variety of codecs: AAC, OGG, AC3, TAK, MP3, and more. You can download more plugins on the AIMP3 forums (be sure to visit the English section if you don’t speak Russian).Go Here:AIMP3 Download Link
All in all, I really like AIMP3. It’s fast and it works. It’s a worthy contender to Foobar2000 and I say that as an avid Foobar2000 user of nearly 10 years. Maybe with more use, I’ll find things that I don’t like about AIMP3–but hey, there are things I don’t like about Foobar2000 as well.

Just give it a try. If you like it, great! If not, no real harm done. If you do decide to try it out, tell us what you think in the comments! Or if you know of any other lightweight music players, I’d love to hear about them, too.

The tag editor of this player is weak. The authors seem to dictate policy with regard to what fields should be put into tags and what tag formats should be used. In a library large enough to need management, the following properties of every album need to be tracked - release date, record label, catalog number, media - to distinguish louder remastered albums (later date/year) and vinyl from CDs with the same title. Sometimes we would like more information, such as the lyricist (author of words). The program only allows a limited set of fields. It also does not permit APEv2 tags to be used with MP3 or other streamed formats (AC-3, DTS, ADTS AAC), as permitted by XMPlay (whose core, BASS, this player was built around), Foobar, Winamp (yes even), Mp3tag.

Also it is not possible to specifiy multiple composers or genres for a track as permitted by the Vorbis and APEv2 specification (for example, we might specify Rock; Hard Rock, or Electronic; Ambient; Space). The player will read them incorrectly (only the last value for FLAC/Vorbis, and all values without separator for APE). If you think some of those genre tags are Styles, the player will disappoint by not allowing to use such a field. AIMP appears to be old technology MP3-centric. When asked to expand tagging in some way, the developers would refuse and explain that "ID3" only allows such and such. It would be perfectly fine if a legacy format only supported a subset of all metadat?.

The skinned graphical interface is clean and at the same time fast. That's a remarkable point. Usually applications with this level of polish are sluggish. Also the player was quick to adopt practical yet rarely supported formats like AC-3 and TAK.

I'm using AIMP since a couple of years (first AIMP2, now AIMP3).
I think it's the best music player with a very light system that does'nt consume all of the computer ressources. And with a lot of different skins.
Just have 2 questions :
. my music library does'nt update automatically. When I add music on my computer, I have to add it manually into the library. I choosed the option "add automatically" but without success. I can I fix it ?
. is it possible to let AIMP search automatically the cover art on the web (like WMP)? I have to do it manually each time I add new songs.
For the rest, nothing to say : it's perfect !

I've used J. River Media Center for years, paying for each new release because of its abundant features that let me organize my music collection my way. (Favorite tools: Search and replace in tags, and "Clean up," which gets rid of pointless spaces, converts underlines to spaces, and best of all, changes information to title case, like Happiness Is a Warm Gun Baby, instead of HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN BABY.) But Media Center has all the stability of pick-up-sticks. Got the latest version a couple of weeks ago, and it's already crashing on two machines. Guess it's time to try AIMP3. Thanks for telling us about it.

I used it before when it still had audio converter bundled in it.
When it became two separated programs i got annoyed and got my hands on MusicBee music manager that has ALL of the tools for music managment, including iPod and internet services, also has built in local concerts listings witch has never been wrong.

Oh man, I've spent countless hours in the past keeping all of my ID3 tags in order. Foobar2000's tag editor is pretty good. AIMP3's is just different. There are pros and cons to each, so you won't really know how good it is until you give it a try. Hope it goes well for you!

I have been using it for a while now, and I really can't say anything bad about it.
Very nice music player.
I tried foobar many times, and it seemed to need to much work done before it becomes something useful enough to work with, so I've stooped using it.

I love AIMP it has a great layout, really lightweight etc but I can never manage to use it when I'm home. I use the portable version on LiberKey but I never feel the incentive to use it over Winamp when I'm at home.

Volume normalizers are fantastic! There was a period where I couldn't live without one but lately I've been lucky in that most of my audio files are already normalized pretty well so I haven't really needed one.